I am trying to run a VirtualBox VM with a guest OS that has 4GB of RAM, but the virtual machine crashes.

At the beginning, I suspected that the crash used to occur due to a lack of memory on the Host OS, due to the fact that the Host OS usually assigns large amounts of memory as “Standby” memory, being the amount of “Free” memory very low.

I have also noticed that sometimes the Host OS has no free memory, but this only happens during a short period of time, while the Host OS unlocks a small piece of the “Standby” memory, being that piece of memory assigned to the “Free” memory.(this process of unlocking “Standby” memory is executed continuously while there is no free memory and while there are applications requesting for more memory).

Considering the memory management process described above, I suspected that the crash used to occur right in the moment when the Host OS has no “Free” memory and while the Host OS is unlocking a piece of memory that is classified as “Standby” memory.

Having all the aspects above in mind, I thought that one way to overcome this issue is to find a mechanism to decrease the amount of memory that the Host OS uses as “Standby” memory. After some research on the internet, I found a Microsoft tool (RAMMAp) that enables you to empty the “StandBy” memory.

With that tool, I have erased all the “Standby” memory and launched the VM. However the VM still crashes and when it happens the Host OS has more than 1GB of free memory.

Looking at all these aspects, it seems to me that this problem is not related with the memory management process of the Host OS.

So, the question that I have is, does VirtualBox support VMs with 4GB of RAM?

Anything Google chrome on the host?http://social.technet.microsoft.com/For ... 184dec89ffTo answer your question if the above is not the cause, yes you can assign 4GB of RAM to the guest, but it must be available for VirtualBox to allocate and lock.I have to wonder what is actually taking that massive amount of memory on the host though. I would search that out and see. Sysinternals has some packages that would help to do that.

Well, it's definitely a low memory error, though I don't really understand why 4GB would be a problem when your PC apparently had 5.5GB available. However I confess that I don't how how memory allocation works on a 64bit Windows host.

Like I said, I don't know enough about Win64 memory allocation - especially for kernel code - to be able to express an opinion. For example, does VirtualBox require the allocation to be wholly contiguous? Or large pages, each contiguous? What in hell are "handy pages"? If asked for contiguous mem can Win64 always provide it by adjusting some kind of physical/logical address map, or will the allocation fail? Why do people need this amount of memory anyway??? (I come from an embedded engineering background where 256MB would be seen as a very generous RAM complement!). Where's my coffee?

You can try turning off nested paging and see if this helps, but the memory (available) and the memory to be allocated should work.It is my understanding that it is contiguous memory but they have been working on that some too so who knows.Try the suggestion and also look at other programs that could conflict. VPN, Virus software, Etc. You can try to set it down a few hundred MB and see if finishes too. Log shows a number above 4GB (4294967296)

Perry also suggested that you try a memory size a few hundred MB less.

Anyway, the antivirus thing was just a suggestion - a usual suspect. You need to look at your process list for other possible candidates. Look in particular at the memory column to find the biggest resource hogs.